Free Will

“Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a
particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of
action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will
sort is what all the fuss is about. (And what a fuss it has been:
philosophers have debated this question for over two millennia, and
just about every major philosopher has had something to say about it.)
Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very
closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility. Acting with
free will, on such views, is just to satisfy the metaphysical
requirement on being responsible for one's action. (Clearly, there
will also be epistemic conditions on responsibility as well, such as
being aware—or failing that, being culpably unaware—of
relevant alternatives to one's action and of the alternatives' moral
significance.) But the significance of free will is not exhausted by
its connection to moral responsibility. Free will also appears to be a
condition on desert for one's accomplishments (why sustained effort
and creative work are praiseworthy); on the autonomy and dignity of
persons; and on the value we accord to love and friendship. (See Kane
1996, 81ff. and Clarke 2003, Ch.1; but see also Pereboom 2001, Ch.7.)

Philosophers who distinguish freedom of action and freedom of will do
so because our success in carrying out our ends depends in part on
factors wholly beyond our control. Furthermore, there are always
external constraints on the range of options we can meaningfully try
to undertake. As the presence or absence of these conditions and
constraints are not (usually) our responsibility, it is plausible that
the central loci of our responsibility are our choices, or
“willings.”

I have implied that free willings are but a subset of willings, at
least as a conceptual matter. But not every philosopher accepts this.
René Descartes, for example, identifies the faculty of will
with freedom of choice, “the ability to do or not do
something” (Meditation IV), and even goes so far as to declare
that “the will is by its nature so free that it can never be
constrained” (Passions of the Soul, I, art. 41). In taking this
strong polar position on the nature of will, Descartes is reflecting a
tradition running through certain late Scholastics (most prominently,
Suarez) back to John Duns Scotus.

The majority view, however, is that we can readily conceive willings
that are not free. Indeed, much of the debate about free will centers
around whether we human beings have it, yet virtually no one
doubts that we will to do this and that. The main perceived threats to
our freedom of will are various alleged determinisms: physical/causal;
psychological; biological; theological. For each variety of
determinism, there are philosophers who (i) deny its reality, either
because of the existence of free will or on independent grounds; (ii)
accept its reality but argue for its compatibility with free will; or
(iii) accept its reality and deny its compatibility with free will.
(See the entries
on compatibilism;
causal determinism;
fatalism;
arguments for incompatibilism;
and divine foreknowledge and free will.)
There are also a few who say the truth of any variety of determinism
is irrelevant because free will is simply impossible.

If there is such a thing as free will, it has many dimensions. In what
follows, I will sketch the freedom-conferring characteristics that
have attracted most of the attention. The reader is warned, however,
that while many philosophers emphasize a single such characteristic,
perhaps in response to the views of their immediate audience, it is
probable that most would recognize the significance of many of the
other features discussed here.

On a minimalist account, free will is the ability to select a course
of action as a means of fulfilling some desire. David Hume, for
example, defines liberty as “a power of acting or of not acting,
according to the determination of the will.” (1748, sect.viii,
part 1). And we find in Jonathan Edwards (1754) a similar account of
free willings as those which proceed from one's own desires.

One reason to deem this insufficient is that it is consistent with the
goal-directed behavior of some animals whom we do not suppose to be
morally responsible agents. Such animals lack not only an awareness of
the moral implications of their actions but also any capacity to
reflect on their alternatives and their long-term
consequences. Indeed, it is plausible that they have little by way of
a self-conception as an agent with a past and with projects and
purposes for the future. (See Baker 2000 on the ‘first-person
perspective.’)

A natural suggestion, then, is to modify the minimalist thesis by
taking account of (what may be) distinctively human capacities and
self-conception. And indeed, philosophers since Plato have commonly
distinguished the ‘animal’ and ‘rational’
parts of our nature, with the latter implying a great deal more
psychological complexity. Our rational nature includes our ability to
judge some ends as ‘good’ or worth pursuing and value them
even though satisfying them may result in considerable unpleasantness
for ourselves. (Note that such judgments need not be based in moral
value.) We might say that we act with free will when we act upon our
considered judgments/valuings about what is good for us, whether or
not our doing so conflicts with an ‘animal’ desire. (See
Watson 2003a for a subtle development of this sort of view.) But this
would seem unduly restrictive, since we clearly hold many people
responsible for actions proceeding from ‘animal’ desires
that conflict with their own assessment of what would be best in the
circumstances. More plausible is the suggestion that one acts with
free will when one's deliberation is sensitive to one's own
judgments concerning what is best in the circumstances, whether or not
one acts upon such a judgment.

Here we are clearly in the neighborhood of the ‘rational
appetite’ accounts of will one finds in the medieval
Aristotelians. The most elaborate medieval treatment is Thomas
Aquinas's.[1]
His account involves identifying several distinct varieties of
willings. Here I note only a few of his basic claims. Aquinas thinks
our nature determines us to will certain general ends ordered to the
most general goal of goodness. These we will of necessity, not
freely. Freedom enters the picture when we consider various means to
these ends, none of which appear to us either as unqualifiedly good or
as uniquely satisfying the end we wish to fulfill. There is, then,
free choice of means to our ends, along with a more basic freedom not
to consider something, thereby perhaps avoiding willing it unavoidably
once we recognized its value. Free choice is an activity that involves
both our intellectual and volitional capacities, as it consists in
both judgment and active commitment. A thorny question for this view
is whether will or intellect is the ultimate determinant of free
choices. How we understand Aquinas on this point will go a long ways
towards determining whether or not he is a sort of compatibilist about
freedom and determinism. (See below. Good expositions of Aquinas'
account are Donagan 1985, MacDonald 1998, Stump 2003, ch.9, and Pasnau 2002, Ch.7.)

There are two general worries about theories of free will that
principally rely on the capacity to deliberate about possible actions
in the light of one's conception of the good. First, there are agents
who deliberately choose to act as they do but who are motivated to do
so by a compulsive, controlling sort of desire. (And there seems to be
no principled bar to a compulsive desire's informing a considered
judgment of the agent about what the good is for him.) Such agents are
not willing freely. (Wallace 2003 and Levy 2007, Ch.6, offer accounts of the way
addiction impairs the will.) Secondly, we can imagine a person's
psychology being externally manipulated by another agent (via
neurophysiological implant, say), such that the agent is caused to
deliberate and come to desire strongly a particular action which he
previously was not disposed to choose. The deliberative process could
be perfectly normal, reflective, and rational, but seemingly not
freely made. The agent's freedom seems undermined or at least greatly
diminished by such psychological tampering (Mele 1995).

Some theorists are much impressed by cases of inner, psychological
compulsion and define freedom of will in contrast to this phenomenon.
For such thinkers, true freedom of the will involves liberation from
the tyranny of base desires and acquisition of desires for the Good.
Plato, for example, posits rational, spirited, and appetitive aspects
to the soul and holds that willings issue from the higher, rational
part alone. In other cases, one is dominated by the irrational desires
of the two lower
parts.[2]
This is particularly characteristic of those working in a theological
context—for example, the New Testament writer St. Paul, speaking
of Christian freedom (Romans vi-viii; Galatians v), and those
influenced by him on this point, such as Augustine. (The latter, in
both early and later writings, allows for a freedom of will that is
not ordered to the good, but maintains that it is of less value than
the rightly-ordered freedom. See, for example, the discussion in Books
II-III of On Free Choice.) More recently, Susan Wolf (1990)
defends an asymmetry thesis concerning freedom and responsibility. On
her view, an agent acts freely only if he had the ability to choose
the True and the Good. For an agent who does so choose, the requisite
ability is automatically implied. But those who reject the Good choose
freely only if they could have acted differently. This is a further
substantive condition on freedom, making freedom of will a more
demanding condition in cases of bad choices.

In considering such rightly-ordered-appetites views of freedom, I
again focus on abstract features common to all. It explicitly handles
the inner-compulsion worry facing the simple deliberation-based
accounts. The other, external manipulation problem could perhaps be
handled through the addition of an historical requirement: agents will
freely only if their willings are not in part explicable by episodes
of external manipulation which bypass their critical and deliberative
faculties (Mele 1995, 2003). But another problem suggests itself: an agent
who was a ‘natural saint,’ always and effortlessly
choosing the good with no contrary inclination, would not have freedom
of will among his virtues. Doubtless we would greatly admire such a
person, but would it be an admiration suffused with moral praise of
the person or would it, rather, be restricted to the goodness of the
person's qualities? (Cf. Kant, 1788.) The appropriate response to
such a person, it seems, is on an analogy with aesthetic appreciation
of natural beauty, in contrast to the admiration of the person who
chooses the good in the face of real temptation to act
selfishly. Since this view of freedom of will as orientation to the
good sometimes results from theological reflections, it is worth
noting that other theologian-philosophers emphasize the importance for
human beings of being able to reject divine love: love of God
that is not freely given—given in the face of a significant
possibility of one's having not done so—would be a sham, all the
more so since, were it inevitable, it would find its ultimate and
complete explanation in God Himself.

Harry Frankfurt (1982) presents an insightful and original way of
thinking about free will. He suggests that a central difference
between human and merely animal activity is our capacity to reflect on
our desires and beliefs and form desires and judgments concerning
them. I may want to eat a candy bar (first-order desire), but I also
may want not to want this (second-order desire) because of
the connection between habitual candy eating and poor health. This
difference, he argues, provides the key to understanding both free
action and free will. (These are quite different, in Frankfurt's view,
with free will being the more demanding notion. Moreover, moral
responsibility for an action requires only that the agent acted
freely, not that the action proceeded from a free will.)

On Frankfurt's analysis, I act freely when the desire on
which I act is one that I desire to be effective. This second-order
desire is one with which I identify: it reflects my true
self. (Compare the addict: typically, the addict acts out of a desire
which he does not want to act upon. His will is divided, and his
actions proceed from desires with which he does not reflectively
identify. Hence, he is not acting freely.) My will is free
when I am able to make any of my first-order desires the one
upon which I act. As it happens, I will to eat the candy bar, but I
could have willed to refrain from doing so.

With Frankfurt's account of free will, much hangs on what being able
to will otherwise comes to, and on this Frankfurt is officially
neutral. (See the related discussion below on ability to do
otherwise.) But as he connects moral responsibility only to his
weaker notion of free action, it is fitting to consider its adequacy
here. The central objection that commentators have raised is this:
what's so special about higher-order willings or desires? (See in
particular Watson 2003a.) Why suppose that they inevitably reflect my
true self, as against first-order desires? Frankfurt is explicit that
higher-order desires need not be rooted in a person's moral or even
settled outlook (1982, 89, n.6). So it seems that, in some cases, a
first-order desire may be much more reflective of my true self (more
“internal to me,” in Frankfurt's terminology) than a weak,
faint desire to be the sort of person who wills differently.

In later writings, Frankfurt responds to this worry first by appealing
to “decisions made without reservations”
(“Identification and Externality” and
“Identification and Wholeheartedness” in Frankfurt, 1988)
and then by appealing to higher-order desires with which one is
“satisfied,” such that one has no inclination to make
changes to them (1992). But the absence of an inclination to change
the desire does not obviously amount to the condition of
freedom-conferring identification. It seems that such a negative
state of satisfaction can be one that I just find myself with, one
that I neither approve nor disapprove (Pettit, 2001, 56).

Furthermore, we can again imagine external manipulation consistent
with Frankfurt's account of freedom but inconsistent with freedom
itself. Armed with the wireless neurophysiology-tampering technology
of the late 21st century, one might discreetly induce a second-order
desire in me to be moved by a first-order desire—a higher-order
desire with which I am satisfied—and then let me deliberate as
normal. Clearly, this desire should be deemed “external”
to me, and the action that flows from it unfree.

Our survey of several themes in philosophical accounts of free will
suggests that a—perhaps the—root issue is that of
control. Clearly, our capacity for deliberation and the
potential sophistication of some of our practical reflections are
important conditions on freedom of will. But any proposed analysis of
free will must also ensure that the process it describes is one that
was up to, or controlled by, the agent.

Fantastic scenarios of external manipulation and less fantastic cases
of hypnosis are not the only, or even primary, ones to give
philosophers pause. It is consistent with my deliberating and choosing
‘in the normal way’ that my developing psychology and
choices over time are part of an ineluctable system of causes
necessitating effects. It might be, that is, that underlying the
phenomena of purpose and will in human persons is an all-encompassing,
mechanistic world-system of ‘blind’ cause and effect. Many
accounts of free will are constructed against the backdrop possibility
(whether accepted as actual or not) that each stage of the world is
determined by what preceded it by impersonal natural law. As always,
there are optimists and pessimists.

John Martin Fischer (1994) distinguishes two sorts of control over
one's actions: guidance and regulative. A person exerts guidance
control over his own actions insofar as they proceed from a
‘weakly’ reasons-responsive (deliberative) mechanism. This
obtains just in case there is some possible scenario where
the agent is presented with a sufficient reason to do otherwise and
the mechanism that led to the actual choice is operative and it issues
in a different choice, one appropriate to the imagined reason. In
Fischer and Ravizza (1998), the account is elaborated and
refined. They require, more strongly, that the mechanism be the
person's own mechanism (ruling out external manipulation) and that it
be ‘moderately’ responsive to reasons: one that is
“regularly receptive to reasons, some of which are
moral reasons, and at least weakly reactive to reason”
(82, emphasis added). Receptivity is evinced through an
understandable pattern of reasons recognition—beliefs of the
agent about what would constitute a sufficient reason for undertaking
various actions. (For details, see Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 69–73, and Fischer's contribution to Fischer et al. 2007.)

None of this, importantly, requires ‘regulative’ control:
a control involving the ability of the agent to choose and act
differently in the actual circumstances. Regulative control requires
alternative possibilities open to the agent, whereas guidance
control is determined by characteristics of the actual
sequence issuing in one's choice. Fischer allows that there is a
notion of freedom that requires regulative control but does not
believe that this kind of freedom is required for moral
responsibility. (In this, he is persuaded by a form of argument
originated by Harry Frankfurt. See Frankfurt 1969 and Fischer 1994,
Ch.7 for an important development of the argument. The argument has
been debated extensively in recent years. See Widerker and McKenna
2003 for a representative sampling. For very recent work, see Franklin 2009 and Fischer 2010 and the works they cite.)

Many do not follow Fischer here, however, and maintain the traditional
view that the sort of freedom required for moral responsibility does
indeed require that the agent could have acted differently. As
Aristotle put it, “…when the origin of the actions is in him,
it is also up to him to do them or not to do them” (NE, Book
III).[3]

A flood of ink has been spilled, especially in the modern era, on how
to understand the concept of being able to do otherwise. On one side
are those who maintain that it is
consistent with my being able to do otherwise that the past (including
my character and present beliefs and desires) and the basic laws of
nature logically entail that I do what I actually do. These are the
‘compatibilists,’ holding that freedom and causal
determinism are compatible. (For discussion, see O'Connor, 2000, Ch.1; Kapitan 2001; van Inwagen 2001; Haji 2009;
compatibilism; and incompatibilism: arguments for.)
Conditional analyses of ability to do otherwise have been popular
among compatibilists. The general idea here is that to say that I am
able to do otherwise is to say that I would do otherwise if
it were the case that … , where the ellipsis is filled by some
elaboration of “I had an appropriately strong desire to do so,
or I had different beliefs about the best available means to satisfy
my goal, or … .” In short: something about my prevailing
character or present psychological states would have differed, and so
would have brought about a different outcome in my deliberation.

Incompatibilists think that something stronger is required: for me to
act with free will requires that there are a plurality of futures open
to me consistent with the past (and laws of nature) being just as
they were—that I be able ‘to add to the given
past’ (Ginet 1990). I could have chosen differently even without
some further, non-actual consideration's occurring to me and
‘tipping the scales of the balance’ in another
direction. Indeed, from their point of view, the whole
scale-of-weights analogy is wrongheaded: free agents are not
mechanisms that respond invariably to specified ‘motive
forces.’ They are capable of acting upon any of a plurality of
motives making attractive more than one course of action. Ultimately,
the agent must determine himself this way or that.

We may distinguish two broad families of ‘incompatibilist’
or ‘indeterminist’ self-determination accounts. The more
radical group holds that the agent who determines his own will is not
causally influenced by external causal factors, including his own
character. Descartes, in the midst of exploring the scope and
influence of ‘the passions,’ declares that “the will
is by its nature so free that it can never be constrained”
(PWD, v.I, 343). And as we've seen, he believed that such freedom is
present on every occasion when we make a conscious choice—even,
he writes, “when a very evident reason moves us in one
direction….” (PWD, v.III, 245). More recently, John Paul
Sartre notoriously held that human beings have ‘absolute
freedom’: “No limits to my freedom can be found except
freedom itself, or, if you prefer, we are not free to cease being
free.” (567) His views on freedom flowed from his radical
conception of human beings as lacking any kind of positive
nature. Instead, we are ‘non-beings’ whose being, moment
to moment, is simply to choose:

For human reality, to be is to choose oneself; nothing comes to it
either from the outside or from within which it can receive or
accept….it is entirely abandoned to the intolerable necessity
of making itself be, down to the slightest details. Thus
freedom…is the being of man, i.e., his nothingness of
being. (568–9)

The medieval philosopher Scotus and mid-twentieth century philosopher C.A. Campbell both appear to agree with
Descartes and Sartre on the lack of direct causal influence on the
activity of free choice while allowing that the scope of possibilities
for what I might thus will may be more or less constricted. So while
Scotus holds that “nothing other than the will is the total
cause” of its activity, he grants (with Aquinas and other
medieval Aristotelians) that we are not capable of willing something
in which we see no good, nor of positively repudiating something which
appears to us as unqualifiedly good. Contrary to Sartre, we come with
a ‘nature’ that circumscribes what we might conceivably
choose, and our past choices and environmental influences also shape
the possibilities for us at any particular time. But if we are
presented with what we recognize as an unqualified good, we still can
choose to refrain from willing it. As for Campbell, while he holds
that character cannot explain a free choice, he supposes that
“[t]here is one experiential situation, and one only,
… in which there is any possibility of the act of will not
being in accordance with character; viz. the situation in which the
course which formed character prescribes is a course in conflict with
the agent's moral ideal: in other words, the situation of moral
temptation” (1967, 46). (Van Inwagen 1994 and 1995 is another
proponent of the idea that free will is exercised in but a small
subset of our choices, although his position is less extreme on this
point than Campbell's. Fischer and Ravizza 1992, O'Connor 2000, Ch.5,
and Clarke 2003, Ch.7 all criticize van Inwagen's argument for this
position.)

A more moderate grouping within the self-determination approach to
free will allows that beliefs, desires, and external factors all can
causally influence the act of free choice itself. But theorists within
this camp differ sharply on the metaphysical nature of those choices
and of the causal role of reasons. We may distinguish three varieties.
I will discuss them only briefly, as they are explored at length in
incompatibilist (nondeterministic) theories of free will.

First is a noncausal (or ownership) account (Ginet 1990, 2002;
McCann 1998; Pink 2004; Goetz 2002). According to this view, I control my volition or choice
simply in virtue of its being mine—its occurring in me. I do not
exert a special kind of causality in bringing it about; instead, it is
an intrinsically active event, intrinsically something I
do. While there may be causal influences upon my choice,
there need not be, and any such causal influence is wholly irrelevant
to understanding why it occurs. Reasons provide an autonomous,
non-causal form of explanation. Provided my choice is not wholly
determined by prior factors, it is free and under my control simply in
virtue of being mine.

Proponents of the event-causal account (e.g. Nozick 1995; Ekstrom
2001; and Franklin forthcoming) would say that uncaused events of any kind would be random and
uncontrolled by anyone, and so could hardly count as choices that an
agent made. They hold that reasons influence choices
precisely by causing them. Choices are free insofar as they
are not deterministically caused, and so might not have occurred in
just the circumstances in which they did occur. (See
nondeterministic theories of free will
and
probabilistic causation.)
A special case of the event-causal account of self-determination is
Kane (1996 and his contribution to Fischer et al., 2007). Kane believes that the free choices of greatest
significance to an agent's autonomy are ones that are preceded by
efforts of will within the process of deliberation. These are cases
where one's will is conflicted, as when one's duty or long-term
self-interest compete with a strong desire for a short-term good. As
one struggles to sort out and prioritize one's own values, the
possible outcomes are not merely undetermined, but also
indeterminate: at each stage of the struggle, the possible
outcomes have no specific objective probability of occurring. This
indeterminacy, Kane believes, is essential to freedom of will.

Finally, there are those who believe freedom of will consists in a
distinctively personal form of causality, commonly referred to as
“agent causation.” The agent himself causes his choice or
action, and this is not to be reductively analyzed as an event within
the agent causing the choice. (Compare our ready restatement of
“the rock broke the window” into the more precise
“the rock's having momentum M at the point of contact with the
window caused the window's subsequent shattering.”) This view is
given clear articulation by Thomas Reid:

I grant, then, that an effect uncaused is a contradiction, and that an
event uncaused is an absurdity. The question that remains is whether a
volition, undetermined by motives, is an event uncaused. This I
deny. The cause of the volition is the man that willed it. (Letter to
James Gregory, in 1967, 88)

Roderick Chisholm advocated this view of free will in numerous
writings (e.g., 1982 and 1976). And recently it has been developed in
different forms by Randolph Clarke (1993, 1996, 2003) and O'Connor
(2000, 2005, 2008a, and 2010). Nowadays, many philosophers view this account as of doubtful
coherence (e.g., Dennett 1984). For some, this very idea of causation
by a substance just as such is perplexing (Ginet 1997 and Clarke 2003,
Ch.10). Others see it as difficult to reconcile with the causal role
of reasons in explaining choices. (See Feldman and Buckareff 2003 and Hiddleston 2005. Clarke and O'Connor devote
considerable effort to addressing this concern.) And yet others hold
that, coherent or not, it is inconsistent with seeing human beings as
part of the natural world of cause and effect (Pereboom 2001, 2004, and 2005).

A recent trend is to suppose that agent causation accounts capture, as
well as possible, our prereflective idea of responsible, free
action. But the failure of philosophers to work the account out in a
fully satisfactory and intelligible form reveals that the very idea of
free will (and so of responsibility) is incoherent (Strawson 1986) or
at least inconsistent with a world very much like our own (Pereboom
2001). Smilansky (2000) takes a more complicated position, on which
there are two ‘levels’ on which we may assess freedom,
‘compatibilist’ and ‘ultimate’. On the
ultimate level of evaluation, free will is indeed
incoherent. (Strawson, Pereboom, and Smilansky all provide concise
defenses of their positions in Kane 2002.)

The will has also recently become a target of empirical study in
neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Benjamin Libet (2002) conducted
experiments designed to determine the timing of conscious willings or
decisions to act in relation to brain activity associated with the
physical initiation of behavior. Interpretation of the results is
highly controversial. Libet himself concludes that the studies provide
strong evidence that actions are already underway shortly
before the agent wills to do it. As a result, we do not
consciously initiate our actions, though he suggests that we might
nonetheless retain the ability to veto actions that are
initiated by unconscious psychological structures. Wegner (2002)
amasses a range of studies (including those of Libet) to argue that
the notion that human actions are ever initiated by their own
conscious willings is simply a deeply-entrenched illusion and proceeds
to offer an hypothesis concerning the reason this illusion is
generated within our cognitive systems. Mele (2009) and O'Connor
(2009b) argue that the data adduced by Libet, Wegner, and others
wholly fail to support their revisionary conclusions.

A large portion of Western philosophical writing on free will was and
is written within an overarching theological framework, according to
which God is the ultimate source and sustainer of all else.
Some of these thinkers draw the conclusion that God must be a
sufficient, wholly determining cause for everything that happens; all
suppose that every creaturely act necessarily depends on the
explanatorily prior, cooperative activity of God. It is also presumed
that human beings are free and responsible (on pain of attributing
evil in the world to God alone, and so impugning His perfect
goodness). Hence, those who believe that God is omni-determining
typically are compatibilists with respect to freedom and (in this
case) theological determinism. Edwards (1754) is a good example. But
those who suppose that God's sustaining activity (and special activity
of conferring grace) is only a necessary condition on the outcome of
human free choices need to tell a more subtle story, on which
omnipotent God's cooperative activity can be (explanatorily) prior to
a human choice and yet the outcome of that choice be settled only by
the choice itself. For important medieval discussions—the
period of the apex of treatments of philosophical/theological
matters—see the relevant portions of Aquinas BW and Scotus
QAM. For an example of a more recent discussion, see Quinn 1983.

Another issue concerns the impact on human freedom of knowledge of
God, the ultimate Good. Many philosophers, especially the medieval
Aristotelians, were drawn to the idea that human beings cannot but
will that which they take to be an unqualified good. (Duns Scotus
appears to be an important exception to this consensus.) Hence, in the
afterlife, when humans ‘see God face to face,’ they will
inevitably be drawn to Him. Murray (1993, 2002) argues that a good God
would choose to make His existence and character less than certain for
human beings, for the sake of their freedom. (He will do so, the
argument goes, at least for a period of time in which human beings
participate in their own character formation.) If it is a good for
human beings that they freely choose to respond in love to God and to
act in obedience to His will, then God must maintain an
‘epistemic distance’ from them lest they be overwhelmed by
His goodness and respond out of necessity, rather than freedom. (See
also the other essays in Howard-Snyder and Moser 2002.)

Finally, there is the question of the freedom of God himself. Perfect
goodness is an essential, not acquired, attribute of God. God cannot
lie or be in any way immoral in His dealings with His creatures.
Unless we take the minority position on which this is a trivial claim,
since whatever God does definitionally counts as good, this
appears to be a significant, inner constraint on God's freedom. Did we
not contemplate immediately above that human freedom would be
curtailed by our having an unmistakable awareness of what is in fact
the Good? And yet is it not passing strange to suppose that God
should be less than perfectly free?

One suggested solution to this puzzle begins by reconsidering the
relationship of two strands in (much) thinking about freedom of will:
being able to do otherwise and being the ultimate source of one's
will. Contemporary discussions of free will often emphasize the
importance of being able to do otherwise. Yet it is plausible (Kane
1996) that the core metaphysical feature of freedom is being the
ultimate source, or originator, of one's choices, and that being able
to do otherwise is closely connected to this feature. For human beings
or any created persons who owe their existence to factors outside
themselves, the only way their acts of will could find their ultimate
origin in themselves is for such acts not to be determined by their
character and circumstances. For if all my willings were wholly
determined, then if we were to trace my causal history back far
enough, we would ultimately arrive at external factors that gave rise
to me, with my particular genetic dispositions. My motives at the time
would not be the ultimate source of my willings, only the
most proximate ones. Only by there being less than
deterministic connections between external influences and choices,
then, is it be possible for me to be an ultimate source of my
activity, concerning which I may truly say, “the buck stops
here.”

As is generally the case, things are different on this point in the
case of God. Even if God's character absolutely precludes His
performing certain actions in certain contexts, this will not imply
that some external factor is in any way a partial origin of His
willings and refrainings from willing. Indeed, this would not be so
even if he were determined by character to will everything which He
wills. For God's nature owes its existence to nothing. So God would be
the sole and ultimate source of His will even if He couldn't will
otherwise.

Well, then, might God have willed otherwise in any respect? The
majority view in the history of philosophical theology is that He
indeed could have. He might have chosen not to create anything at all.
And given that He did create, He might have created any number of
alternatives to what we observe. But there have been noteworthy
thinkers who argued the contrary position, along with others who
clearly felt the pull of the contrary position even while resisting
it. The most famous such thinker is Leibniz (1710), who argued that
God, being both perfectly good and perfectly powerful, cannot fail to
will the best possible world. Leibniz insisted that this is consistent
with saying that God is able to will otherwise, although his defense
of this last claim is notoriously difficult to make out
satisfactorily. Many read Leibniz, malgre lui, as one whose
basic commitments imply that God could not have willed other than He
does in any respect.

On might challenge Leibniz's reasoning on this point by questioning
the assumption that there is a uniquely best possible Creation (an
option noted by Adams 1987, though he challenges instead Leibniz's
conclusion based on it). One way this could be is if there is no
well-ordering of worlds: some worlds are sufficiently different in
kind that they are incommensurate with each other (neither is better
than the other, nor are they equal). Another way this could be is if
there is no upper limit on goodness of worlds: for every possible
world God might have created, there are others (infinitely many, in
fact) which are better. If such is the case, one might argue, it is
reasonable for God to arbitrarily choose which world to create from
among those worlds exceeding some threshold value of overall
goodness.

However, William Rowe (2004) has countered that the thesis that there
is no upper limit on goodness of worlds has a very different
consequence: it shows that there could not be a morally perfect
Creator! For suppose our world has an on-balance moral value of n and
that God chose to create it despite being aware of possibilities
having values higher than n that He was able to create. It seems we
can now imagine a morally better Creator: one having the same options
who chooses to create a better world. For critical replies to Rowe, see Almeida (2008), Ch.1; O'Connor 2008b; and Kray (2010).

Finally, Norman Kretzmann (1997, 220–25) has argued in the context of
Aquinas's theological system that there is strong pressure to say that
God must have created something or other, though it may well have been
open to Him to create any of a number of contingent orders. The reason
is that there is no plausible account of how an absolutely perfect God
might have a resistible motivation—one consideration
among other, competing considerations—for creating something
rather than nothing. (It obviously cannot have to do with any sort of
utility, for example.) The best general understanding of God's being
motivated to create at all—one which in places Aquinas himself
comes very close to endorsing—is to see it as reflecting the
fact that God's very being, which is goodness, necessarily diffuses
itself. Perfect goodness will naturally communicate itself outwardly;
God who is perfect goodness will naturally create, generating a
dependent reality that imperfectly reflects that goodness. (Wainwright
(1996) is a careful discussion of a somewhat similar line of thought
in Jonathan Edwards. See also Rowe 2004.)

Pereboom (2009) samples a number of important historical and
contemporary writers on free will. Bourke (1964) and Dilman (1999)
provide critical overviews of many historically-significant
writers. Fischer, Kane, Pereboom, and Vargas (2007) provide a readable
while careful debate that sets out some main views by four leading
thinkers. For thematic treatments, see Fischer (1994); Kane (1996),
esp. Ch.1–2; 5–6; Ekstrom (2001); Watson (2003b); and the outstanding
collection of lengthy survey articles in Kane (2002, with an updated
version due to appear in 2011). Finally, for a topically comprehensive
set of important contemporary essays on free will, see the four-volume
Fischer (2005).

Wainwright, William (1996). “Jonathan Edwards, William Rowe,
and the Necessity of Creation,” in J. Jordan and
D. Howard-Snyder, eds., Faith Freedom, and
Rationality. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 119–133.

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